Renovating our current building would include 7-12 million dollars of remediation on top of renovation costs. Additionally, we had to carefully consider how we could continue to provide services to survivors during construction. Those living in our shelter have suffered trauma and victimization and living in a construction zone would take its toll on their recovery and create unneeded upheaval in their lives. We love the historical aspect of our current building, however, renovation is not feasible.

A new structure will cost approximately 12-15 million dollars and it will allow us to expand our services to include permanent supportive housing - a huge need in our community. It gives us the opportunity to expand and increase our youth development services, as well. Currently, the YWCA Summer Food Program is held offsite at the Goedde Building and First United Methodist Church. A new facility allows us to have all services within the same location and continue our impact for another 100+ years!

With the assistance of KO Consulting, we will be exploring every avenue of federal and state grant streams that are currently offering funding to build facilities that support the services we provide. We also hope that local businesses and private donors will pledge to make this dream a reality.

This capital campaign and the subsequent construction of a new facility will take approximately 3-4 years to complete. In the meantime, we plan to be good stewards of and maintain the structure we are currently in as we must still provide quality services to those in need.

While keeping in mind what is best for Van Wert County, we will explore the best option for the current building over the next few years.

Our focus is to assist survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking as well as to provide quality programming to the youth of our community. Because there are several great fitness centers meeting our community's needs in Van Wert, we will not duplicate those services. We believe a new facility would best be utilized to improve our current services and offer other programs that are currently lacking in Van Wert County.